Month: July 2012

Fake geeks prey on us poor lonely “true geeks” – 4 realz yo

Note: apparently it hasn’t been completely obvious to a few people so just saying up front, this is a mock blog šŸ™‚

Don’t you hate it when you go to a geeky event, and you see a guy dressed up as Mal or Ironman or Wolverine (swoon) and it turns out they are just a booth babe, or worse, a sales guy. It’s like, the biggest let down! OMG! They are obviously purposefully poaching on us poor lonely and desperate geeks and frankly we’ve had enough! If you aren’t a true geek, then pretending to be one is worse than poaching, it is maliciously playing with the hearts and minds of the people who run your networks, and read your email, and could, with very little effort, utterly destroy your life and reputation online.

Do you feel me?

Even worse, I hate when you meet a cute guy who does turn out to own a computer, but also turns out to be a total Windows fanboi. Raving on and on about his 1337 VB skills, or how everyone that picks on Windows 8 totally sucks because no one has even seen it yet but it is totally “awesum”. He despises “freetards” because they are all so unrealistic about the industry and “it’s not like Linux has even made it on the desktop anyway, so who cares?”. Yeah, Windows fanbois are totally fake and should stop pretending.

Then you get the Apple banbois. The ones who wear berets because they think it is fashionable, maintain a pretentious sense of (secretly self) loathing about geeks and pretend to be passionate about design and typefaces because it helps them get laid given the demographic of the vast majority of Mac users. An Apple fanboi will lament about how Steve Jobs was Gandhi, Einstein and Jesus in one man, and wear turtlenecks because they think it makes them just like Steve. Apple fanbois are fakers who should stop pretending and learn how to be a true geek!

Then you get the device geeks. You know the ones, who always have the latest gadget regardless of the brand, who like to show off their immensely huge collection of apps, and who think installing an upgrade to Angry Birds somehow makes them technically competent. I got news for you chum, you are a fake geek! Stop it!

You know when you meet guys who talk about being a sysadmin ninja, or a gun at games development? FAKE! I have studied martial arts for 21 years and you sir, are no ninja. You couldn’t hit a wet towel and you couldn’t fire a gun to save yourself. Your limp wrist and shoulder muscles would buckle from the kick back so just stop. We won’t be tormented like this!

Finally you might get lucky enough to meet a guy who can program in a real language, can run his own infrastructure, is into gaming and loves to throw around Star Wars and Evil Dead III quotes. But then he expects you to stay in the kitchen, or give up work entirely to look after the kids by yourself, or he wants you to not beat him in Tekken or Call of Duty ‘cos his friends might laugh at him being “beaten by a girl” and frankly he doesn’t want the competition at home. Geek guys who turn out to be misogynists are the most annoying kind of fake geeks, because they have forgotten that true geekiness has nothing to do with gender, and they encourage geek girls to reject either their geekiness or their girliness. You guys need to be put down, you are the worst kind of fake geeks. No rly.

So, I guess it’s too much for a geek girl to find a real geek guy, one who looks like Wolverine or Mal, who can talk my language, use the same tech, play the same games, treat me like a human being and not disagree with my particular flavour of geekiness in any way shape or form.

Or perhaps we should all just chill out and let Bartlet be Bartlet.

No one has a monopoly on geekiness, and there are many flavours of geeks out there. It is actually really awesome that being geeky is becoming popular because we need more people to get on the path of tech literacy, whatever their incentive. Otherwise when the machines come our army will be very small šŸ˜‰

For another fantastic and better written blog post about this is John Scalzi’s “Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants toĀ Be“. Read it, now! šŸ™‚

Note: This mockblog post is inspired by a good article by Daniel Griffiths (‘Fake Geek Girls’: How Geek Gatekeeping Is Bad For Business) which responds to the growing number of articles berating “fake geek girls”.

It’s incredible to me how idiotic some people can be, how short sighted they are in their own quest for self importance. Personally I love the fact that being geeky has become trendy, has become something people aspire to. As a geek I want to encourage our society to embrace and be empowered by technology, not shut down a person because they “aren’t a true geek”. What does that even mean anyway? So I hope you enjoyed my trollish response to the quite pretentious “Booth babes need not apply” article by Joe Peacock. Hey Joe, the article didn’t start too bad, but by the end it just got stupid. But well done for bringing an important discussion to the fore.

Speech from Nethui on Open Government and Gov 2.0

Kia ora everyone, and thank you for having me over here from Australia.

I’d like to talk a little about Gov 2.0. For all the techs that groan, I agree it is a stupid term, but nonetheless is has come to represent something quite profound.

eGovernment of days past was a first step towards governments going online. They looked at how government could put the same forms and pamphlets online that were handed out in government shopfronts and how citizens could submit those forms back again. Agencies and departments – by and large – did their own projects and it certainly did take us a huge step towards enabling citizens to access and interact with government.

However the different between eGovernment and the Gov 2.0 movement is significant.

Basically, Gov 2.0 is about three things:

  1. Genuine Public Engagement – Recognising that governments can’t work in isolation anymore if we are to be relevant to the communities we serve, and in order to be capable of responding to new opportunities and challenges in a timely and effective fashion. This also means more access to and transparency around the machinery of government and democracy. Of course, being apolitical, I would love to see this engagement primarily at the public service level where we have the most incentive to get evidence based policy outcomes. Public engagement isn’t about just getting your media team on social media. It is about recognising that the old premise that the media is the only platform to communicate with the public is now false. Traditional media comms are about controlling the message, engaging with journos in the most effective way for them, broadcasting the message as much as possible in as positive way as possible. Online community development skills are about recognising we have no real control over the message. Collaboration, understanding the topic area, understanding where and how the community discussions are taking place, empathy, respect and a genuine passion for community feedback and input are all part of online communty development.
  2. Citizen-Centric Service and Information Design – a cross agency and even cross jurisdictional approach that doesn’t expect an individual to understand the complexities of government, but rather can get a personalised service based on how much or little personal information they want to give. In this way, however the bureacracy of government is carved up today should not affect a consistent and reliable experience of citizens.
  3. Government as a Platform for Public and Private Innovation – by recognising that governments can’t and indeed shouldn’t try to do everything all the time and that our primary role is to serve the needs of our citizens, governments should recognise where we can facilitate others to innovate. Where we can facilitate others to create new social and economic value. A great example of this is the enormous amout of publicly funded data and software that is made by government through our business as usual functions, and how free and public access to government owned data and software can stimulate entire industries and research sectors. The economic value of a series of geospatial datasets released by the US Government some years ago was estimated to be 20 times the value of what the government themselves could commercialise.

The policy basis for Gov 2.0 and open government in Australia is found in the following documents:

Other relevant documents and initiatives include:

NB – I’ll add more here next week šŸ™‚ Just wanted to get this post up sooner rather than later.

Let me give you a brief examples of each pillar from Australia:

  1. Genuine Public Engagement: The Public Sphere consultation methodology – enhancing traditional government consultations through online community development and consultation methods. Community development for better consultation design and to get thought leaders onside, peer review, content and commmunity analysis (link gives example).
  2. Citizen-Centric Service and Information Design – australia.gov.au – currently very beta but is in the process of being developed into a single interface for citizens to self select the services and information they need from across all federal government, with a consistent login and single place to manage their information and interactions with government.
  3. Government as a Platform for Public and Private Innovation:
    • dataACT – An interface approach for all ACT government data, making it accessible, machine and human readable, mashable, downloadable, contextual, reused and able to be visualised on the site by non-experts. Interfacing directly with government data sets wherever they are so people are still seeing the most up to date information live. Privacy, commercial and security implications to consider and take into account but it means access is not held ransom to legacy systems or slow procurement refresh cycles.
    • GovCamp and GovHack Australia is an example of how open data facilitates private innovation. Held a month ago in Australia we had seven government departments across Federal and State all contribute funding and data sets for developers to create new mashups, applications and data visualisations. Several of these are getting funded to further develop and be integrated into government service delivery and the competition focused on science, digital humanities and open government. The categorisation gave developers a focus and we ended up with over 40 full functional software prototypes.
Also a more in depth list of examples of Gov 2.0 from Australia was presented by Minister Lundy at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC a couple of years ago. Obviously there are more recent examples too, but this is a good list šŸ™‚

Basically Gov 2.0 is to eGovernment what social media is to email. A whole new world of collaboration, consolidation and crowdsourcing.

What does it take to achieve open government?

  • Great people! – identify, upskill or hire
  • Political leadership – Declarations of open government in Aus, NZ, US, UK, Permission to make mistakes also vital.
  • Policy – directives and support for all of government to comply, to engage online, risk mitigation strategies
  • Technical – procurement policy, standards, copyright, interoperability, APIs, low barrier to entry, geospatial is KEY!
  • Cultural – shifting to collaborative, open, engaging, genuine interest in what the public can bring (THIS IS NEW)
  • Structural – a way to get compliance and open gov across all gov
  • Precedent – examples, to celebrate, to learn from, to encourage and to mitigate risk

Let’s look at what is happening around the world in this space:

Note: I have covered this in greater detail in part two of my blog post on Gov 2.0: Where to begin, so please check that out šŸ™‚

  • UK – Power of Information Taskforce, open data, engaged with developer community, trying to shift frontline service delivery, COINs, the Guardian
  • US – traditionally have had open data, some great initiatives a few years ago, IT Dashboard example (open source!), the Open Government Partnership, Vivek Kundra and being prepared to hold industry to account. See the interview I did with Vivek.
  • Canada – Chris Moore, the CIO of Edmonton – a great example of an innovative approach to public service – flattening the hierarchy for a skills and time based approach to projects
  • NZ – Vikram will be discussing

See some interviews I did with Chris Moore and Andrew Stott on Minister Lundy’s blog below her also rather excellent talk.

Culture shift

Of course, Gov 2.0 is riding on the back of a signficant and incredible movement sweeping across the planet, and this is no more evident that the conversations at Nethui amongst visionaries and thought leaders like yourselves. Here in this room we have people from such diverse backgrounds, industries, the public sector, researchers and many more. And it is in coming together that we are able to leverage the power of a cross-discipline co-design approach to new opportunities and challenges.

It is the power of collaboration that we find true innovation.

Technology has shifted the way we think.

Big statement I know but technology has empowered individuals in a way never seen before. Within a decade or two, we have seen widespread and rapidly growing access to all the traditional dimensions of power that the very foundations of society have been based upon. Think about it, we now have massive distribution of publishing, communications, monitoring (Foucault would love the Internet), force (the one keeping spooks up at night) and finally, the emerging possibility of massive distribution of property with 3D printing and nanotechnology.

Power used to be who had the biggest swords or guns. But technology gives us all the power to be disruptive. It is liberating!

So with these major shifts in society, it brings up the interesting question of what is the point of a government? For some it is about creating and enforcing laws, for some it is about market regulation. Perhaps government is about the common good?

For me, governments are a way to get an economy of scale for common good and common problems in a society. It goes a long way towards a good baseline quality of life for all people in a society, no matter what situation they are born into. I know this comes from an Australian perspective, but I think we largely share that cultural assumption of the role of government.

Regulation, trade, health, roads, education, all of this comes (or should come) from the basis of a good quality of life for citizens so the community can thrive socially, economically & democratically.

The point is that life is changing dramatically and being clear on what asusmptions from the past still hold for the future is an important part of creating resilience in the future.

Basically, the future of government and indeed society, is to be found in collaboration. In leveraging all the skills, passion and experience in our societies and transparently building the future together.

Thank you.

I’ll update this post with more stuff when I’ve slept šŸ™‚ Otherwise, if you want any further links leave me a comment.

Public engagement: more customer service than comms

I’ve been involved in online communities for many years. I’ve seen and been in projects that span every possible traditional barrier to collaboration (location, culture, language, politics, religion, gender, etc, etc). This experience combined with my time in government has given me some useful insights about the key elements that make for a constructive online community.

What I came to learn was the art and craft of community development and management. This skill is common in the technology world, particularly in large successful open source projects where projects either evolve to have good social infrastructure or they fail. There are of course a few exceptions to the rule where bad behaviour is part of the culture of a project, but by and large, a project that is socially inclusive and that empowers individuals to contribute meaningfully will do better than one that is not.

It turns out these skills are not as widespread as I expected. This is problematic as we are now seeing a horde of ā€œsocial media expertsā€ who often give shallow and unsustainable advice to government and companies alike, advice that is not rooted in the principles of community engagement.

The fact is that social media tools are part of a broader story. A story that sees ā€œtraditionalā€ communications turned upside down. The skills to best navigate this space and have a meaningful outcome are not based in the outdated premise that a media office is the single source of communications due to the media being the primary mechanism to get information out to the general public. There will continue to be, I believe, a part for the media to play (we could all use professional analysis and unbiased news coverage, please). However, as governments in particular, we will have a far more meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with citizens where we genuinely and directly engage with them on matters of policy, service delivery, democratic participation and ways that government can facilitate public and private innovation.

You might be lucky and have some media people who have adapted well to the new world order, but any social media strategy limited to the media office will have limitations in delivery that starts to chafe after a while.

It is when you get your customer service and policy people engaged online that you will start to see genuine engagement, genuine community building and the possibility to leverage crowdsourcing. It is when you start to get people skilled in community engagement involved to work alongside your media people and in collaboration with the broader organisation that you will be able to best identify sustainable and constructive ways your organisation can apply social media, or indeed, whatever comes next.

Below are some vital skills I would recommend you identify, hire or upskill in your organisation. Outsourcing can be useful but ideally, to do this stuff well, you need the skills within your organisation. Your own people who know the domain space and can engage withĀ imprimaturĀ on behalf of your organisation.

I’ll continue to build this post up as I have time, and would love your feedback šŸ™‚

Herding Cats

In my time in online communities I came to understand the subtleties in what we in the geek world refer to as ā€œherding catsā€. That is, working with a large number of individuals who have each their own itch to scratch, skills, interests and indeed, vices. Individuals who have a lot to contribute and are motivated for myriad reasons to get involved.

I learnt how to get the best out of people by creating a compelling narrative, having a meaningful goal, uniting people over what we have in common rather than squabbling over what is different.

Herding cats is about genuinely wanting people to get involved, recognising you can’t ā€œcontrolā€ the conversation or outcomes, but you can encourage a constructive dialogue. Herding cats ends up being about leadership, building respect, being an active part of a live conversation, setting and encouraging a constructive tone, managing community expectations and being a constant presence that people can turn to and rely upon. Cat herding is about building community.

Finally, herding cats is about managing trolls in a constructive way. Sometimes trolls are just passionate people who have been burnt and feel frustrated. They can sometimes become your greatest contributors because they often care about the topic. If you always engage with trolls in a helpful and constructive way, you won’t miss the opportunities to connect with those who genuinely have something meaningful to contribute.

Community and Topic Research

You need to know the communities of interest. The thought leaders, where they are having their discussions, what one-to-many points (technical, social, events) can you tap into to encourage participation and to get your finger on the pulse of what the community really thinks. Community research is about knowing a little about the history and context of the communities involved, about the right (and wrong) language, about if and how they have engaged before and getting the information you need to build a community of interest.

Topic research means your community engagement person needs to know enough about the domain area to be able to engage intelligently with communities of interest. Your organisation is effectively represented by these people so you need them to be smart, informed, genuine, socially and emotionally intelligent, ā€œcustomer serviceā€ oriented and able to say when they don’t know, but be able to follow it up.

Collaboration & Co-design

This skillset is about intuitively trying to include others in a process. Trying to connect the dots on communities, perspectives, skills and interests to draw people from industry, academia and any other relevant groups into the co-design of your project. By getting knowledgable, clever and connected people in the tent, you achieve both a better plan and a community of (possible influential) people who will hopefully want to see your initiative succeed. Co-design isn’t just about creating something and asking people’s opinion, but engaging them in the process of developing the idea in the first place.

A little thanks goes a long way. By publicly recognising the efforts of contributors you also encourage them to continue to contribute but whatever you are engaging on needs to be meaningful, and have tangible outcomes people can see and get behind.

Real outcomes of your online engagement are key in managing public expectations.

Monitoring, Analysis & Feedback Mechanisms

It is vital that you have internally the skills to monitor what is happening online, analyse both the content generated and the context around the content created (the community, individuals, location, related news, basically all the metadata that helps you understand what the data means).

By constantly monitoring and analysing, you should be able to identify iterative improvements to your online engagement strategy, your project, policy or ā€œproductā€. Most people focus on one of these three (usually the latest toy with pretty but meaningless graphs spruiked by some slick salesperson), but it is by turning the data into knowledge and finally into actions or iterative improvements that you will be able to respond in a timely and appropriate manner to new opportunities and challenges.

UPDATE – quick shout out to the rather usefulĀ Online Engagement Guidance and Web 2.0 Toolkit for Australian Government Agencies. This was a funded outcome from the Gov 2.0 Taskforce.